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Jules Bianchi – Is a high-risk career worth the money?

The violent crash at the Japanese Grand Prix calls into question whether the life of a racing driver is worth the money. These men are paid handsomely for their efforts, but they could die at any minute on the track. It is best for people to remember what it is like to do this job, but it is also wise for people to think about what it means to the driver who do this job.

The Risk

The risk in F1 is high, and Jules Bianchi saw that firsthand when he was injured so badly that he had to be rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery for head injuries. His crash was so violent that is stopped the race. People crash all the time, but this crash stopped the race. Bianchi is no doubt a millionaire, but people would wonder why he would risk it all just to drive a car quickly.

Every one of the drivers on the circuit does not have an imagination. People like Bianchi or Schumacher or Alonso or Vettel do not think for a second about what could happen when they crash. These men only think about winning races. They only think about doing their best. They know the risks, but they do not sit around thinking about it.

The Pay

F1 drivers are paid extremely well, and they participate in the most glamorous sport in the world. They do something that is more difficult than any other sport, and it is difficult, but they live the lives of rock stars. They know this fame will be short-lived, but they drive regardless.

Jules Bianchi knew the risks when he got in the car. He is being paid extremely well to do his job, and it is worth it to him. People around the world may not have the bravery or raw talent to become a great driver, but he does. He has a ride on the Formula One World Championship circuit. He has to take his car to the limit if he wants to do well.

The Alternatives

Someone like Jules Bianchi does not have to leave the sport even if he is injured badly. Many drivers will get back in the car, but other drivers will simply move to other parts of the sport. Drivers can become owners, engineers and test drivers. These drivers can become test drivers and designers for auto makers, and they can commentate on the sport they love.

They do not want to go to these alternatives because they cannot drive forever. There is also a Masters Series coming up for F1 where drivers who are over 45 can ride. These men get back in the car at high risk to their lives because it is what they love. When someone is this passionate about something, they must keep doing it.

Walking Dead: Would You Be Ready for the Apocalypse?

News

Would you be ready for the apocalypse? The Walking Dead asks that question every week. There is a great deal of human intrigue in the show, but the show is always asking you, the viewer, if you would be ready to deal with an apocalypse on that order. The idea goes much farther than dealing with zombies. Truly, zombies are the easy part of the apocalypse.

Lost People

We live in a world where we are very connected. You know people from all over the world, and it the entire world has been overrun by an apocalypse at once, all the people you are connected to around the world are effectively gone. There is no chance you will ever see them again. The people on the show deal with those ideas every day. There are so many people they miss that they never go to to say goodbye to.

Insecurity

The one thing that the apocalypse creates is insecurity. You will have no idea what is going to happen the next morning. You never know when someone in your crew is going to be bitten or killed. You have no idea when you will run into other humans you cannot trust. There is not a safe place on Earth. Even if you lock down a house, there is no way to know for sure that zombies would not get in.

Violence

The Walking Dead graphically depicts the violence that is necessary to kill zombies. You would have to “kill” thousands of people who have become zombies. You can see their wedding rings. You can see them in their uniforms, and you know that they used to be somebody. However, you have to end them in order to save yourself. Many of us believe we could do that, but we need to think twice before we assume we could be that violent.

Order

The lack of order in the world is the thing that would break most of us. We can reconcile loss, but that loss is hard to reconcile when there is no order in the world. There is not one authority on the planet that is still operating. How would you be able to resolve problems without such a structure?

On the show, all these problems are handled violently. Murdering violent people is all part of the job if you want to stay alive. It is one thing to kill a zombie that is no longer a person, but it is something else to kill a real person who is simply a thieving criminal.

You might think that you would do just fine when you are watching The Walking Dead, but you would not know unless it happened in real life. The zombie apocalypse is not all fun and games. At its heart is a tense human emotion called loss that we would all have to confront head on.

Book Review: Turning Pro

Book Review

I’ve got a big to-read pile. It’s got approximately 200 physical books and 400 ebooks on it.

I may have a problem.

I’ve also been going through a massive decluttering/organizing phase. It must be a phase because I’ve never been so dedicated to cleaning out my stuff before.

The combination is interesting for me. I can’t throw out the books because they’re books. Books aren’t for the garbage, they are for reading, savoring, sharing. Gotta read ’em.

Since I want to organize and declutter, the books need to be read before they can be moved to my “already read this” bookshelves with their 2500 new brothers and sisters.

Did I mention I may have a problem?

My solution is simple. I put a book I’ve been meaning to read in my upstairs reading room. I put another book I’ve been meaning to read in my downstairs reading room. Depending on where I am when the…err…need to read comes upon me, I’ve got a book that isn’t my current fiction read ready to go. I just have to make sure the book doesn’t fall into the sink. (If you’re slow, this means my reading rooms are what other people call bathrooms.) Other people bring their smartphones into the reading room, but I’m trying to better myself. Facebook isn’t going to do that for me. And yes, this means I’m currently reading 4 books at once. (Reading room #1, reading room #2, kindle[fiction], kindle[non-fiction])

The first book in the series is Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield.

Hated it.

That was easy.

Now, I like Pressfield’s fiction. Gates of Fire was one of the coolest takes on one the most bad-ass battles in recorded history. It’s good.

I’m not a fan of his non-fiction, though. Turning Pro is all about how to “Tap your inner power and create your life’s work.” Wonderful! I want that.

The problem is that he forgot to include that part. The entire book can be summarized as “Drop everything and make your work happen. You can do it! (cue hippie-woo-feelings). If you don’t succeed, it’s your fault. Go flip a burger.” It’s all true enough, but hardly worthy of the time spent writing a book. I’m glad I got it free.

Read Gates of Fire instead.

How Cheap Can a Disney Vacation Be?

Finance, Parenting

Earlier this month, I took my family to Disney World. That’s me, my wife, and my three kids (ages 8, 9, 16). Disney is one of the most expensive vacations you can take in the U.S.

We went from one Saturday to the next, in the beginning of August. August is just after peak season, so prices and crowds were down a bit from early summer. During the school year is out of the question because my wife is a school bus driver at an understaffed company. It was a bit hotter, but the price and family availability balanced out the heat nicely.

We stayed in a 1 bedroom resort on Disney property. It was a bit more expensive, but the room slept all five of us, my wife and I had a separate bedroom, and it was equipped with a full kitchen and laundry.

This wasn’t cheap.

We spent:

$1595.96 on airfare and car rental, as a package
$75 on upgrading the seats on our flight one way, because those were the only seats available next to each other.
$131.11 upgrading our rental car during pickup. The third row seating was nice, both for our day trip to Cocoa Beach and for our grocery run with five suitcases.
$4396.21 for the hotel, 4 days of Disney parks, and the included Magic Bands. Magic Bands are the awesomest way to handle hotel rooms, resort tickets, and food. You don’t need to carry a wallet in Disney World.
$715.26 on things charged to our Magic Bands, including miscellaneous coffee, snack, and water purchases in the park, a few small souvenirs, approximately $380 at in-park restaurants, and a couple of gifts for the people who took care of our pets while we were gone.
$15 for parking at the Cocoa Beach Pier
$152.28 for lunch at the restaurant on the pier
Roughly $350 on groceries and one fast food drive through meal one night
$118.31 at the horrible Wolfgang Puck Express restaurant at the Disney Springs shopping center
$31.59 on gas for the rental car.
$47.35 for a movie to kill time between hotel checkout and airport check-in
Total: $7628.07

We saved:

$1404.14 by using signup bonus miles from two Chase Sapphire cards, bringing the flight plus rental to $188.82 plus upgrades.
$1870.16 by using Capital One Venture card rewards. A bonus reward on one card, and regular miles on another.
Total: $3274.30

Grand Total: $4353.77

We had about $2000 of that saved before we bought the tickets and $2000 more budgeted to pay the remaining bill quickly. $4350 spent on a trip with a $4000 budget isn’t too bad.

We opened the rewards cards more than a year ago to make sure we’d hit the sign-up bonus qualifications in time.

A few Disney tips:

Your first day in the park, find a Disney Vacation Club booth. Go to a timeshare sales pitch. For real. It’s a low-pressure pitch that’s over in 45 minutes if you’re not interested (and you won’t be. Timeshares–especially at retail price–are stupid. Don’t sign up.) that will net you three tap-and-go fast passes and a $100 gift card. The fast passes alone saved us about 3 hours of lines.
Install the Disney app. You can get directions to rides and manage fast passes and dinner reservations.
Subscribe to Touring Plans. It costs $10 if you have a coupon, and there’s always a coupon. You can plan out your day at each park, including fast passes and breaks. It will give you wait times and walking times and suggest what is possibly the most efficient way to see everything you want to see. We saw 90% of everything everyone was interested in without running around. You really can do all of each of the parks in 4 days.
Take breaks. We got there early, then left a bit after lunch time to head back to the hotel for food, rest, and swimming. We came back shortly before dinner and spent the evening. That skipped the hottest, busiest part of the day and helped avoid small children getting crabby. Take breaks.
Go to each of the parks on their least busy day. It’s easiest to see it all if you plan to be there when fewer other people are competing for line space.
Don’t waste your fast passes on rides with short lines. We made it through the Pirates of the Caribbean line in 10 minutes. That would have been wasteful.
Try to book all of your fast passes in the morning, so you can schedule new ones for later in the day. You can’t add new ones while you have pending ones on your account.
Use the timeshare fast passes at Magic Kingdom. They don’t have to be scheduled and must be used on a moving ride. Magic Kingdom is the heaviest concentration of moving rides, and they have the longest lines.
Have fun. For real, don’t forget to have fun. If people are getting crabby, pack up and head to the hotel for a few hours. The only park that makes this a pain is Magic Kingdom, since they hide the park a mile away from the parking. Don’t force the park experience, just let go and let things happen. Says the guy who brought an optimized agenda to each park

This was a good time for us. I’m glad we waited. We’re in the short window where the girls will remember the trip and the boy hasn’t moved out and gotten a busy life of his own.

30 Day Project Update – January

Misc

For those who don’t remember–or are just tuning in–I am doing a 30 Day Project every month this year, sometimes two. For the month of January, I am doing two projects. I am waking up at 5AM every day, and I had planned to read to my kids every night before bed.

Waking up hasn’t been that difficult. I’m tempted to snooze the alarm, but I haven’t done that yet. My routine has been to wake up at 5, watch or read the news until I am fully awake, have breakfast, get ready for work, read all of the websites I follow in Google Reader, then get the kids ready. Until this month, my routine was to get up at 6:30, rush to get ready, rush more to get the kids ready, head out the door. This has been more relaxing and it let’s me start my workday fully awake, which wasn’t happening before. I’m hoping to get some writing time in there and next month, exercise time. The interesting thing is that I haven’t adjusted what time I go to bed by much, so this has actually added 90 minutes to my day.

It’s been interesting. I’m dead tired at 9PM, but I’m surprisingly wide awake by 5:30. It hasn’t been nearly as hard as I had feared. I’m looking forward to spring, when I can greet the sunrise.

Reading hasn’t gone as well. At the beginning of the month, I told the girls I would read to them every night. We started out wonderfully. Then, the real world came in uninvited. I had a meeting at school that ran late. My son’s wrestling season started. Things just kept getting in the way of a bedtime story. The solution? We modified the deal. It’s not a bedtime story any more. I am reading to the girls whenever there is time. I may not be home at bedtime every day, but I am certainly home at other times. We’re making it happen, even if it’s not exactly as planned.

It’s just a demonstration of the old rule: Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. A small amount of flexibility has turned a potentially failed goal into happy family time. It’s still a win.
How are your resolutions progressing?

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-17

Misc

@Elle_CM Natalie's raid looked like it was filmed with a strobe light. Lame CGI in reply to Elle_CM #
I want to get a toto portable bidet and a roomba. Combine them and I'll have outsourced some of the least tasteful parts of my day. #
RT @freefrombroke: RT @moneybeagle: New Blog Post: Money Hacks Carnival #115 http://goo.gl/fb/AqhWf #
TED.com: The neurons that shaped civilization. http://su.pr/2Qv4Ay #
Last night, fell in the driveway: twisted ankle and skinned knee. Today, fell down the stairs: bruise makes sitting hurt. Bad morning. #
RT @FrugalDad: And to moms, please be more selective about the creeps you let around your child. Takes a special guy to be a dad to another' #
First Rule of Blogging: Don't let real life get in the way. Epic fail 2 Fridays in a row. But the garage sale is going well. #

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